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The Truth about the 


By 


R. TRAVERS HERFORD 


Librarian of the Williams Library 
of London; Author of Pharisaism. 





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INTERCOLLEGIATE MENORAH ASSOCIATION 
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_ Copyright, 1925, by the i 
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The Truth about the Pharisees 


By R. Travers HeErrForp 


PHARISAIC: Resembling the Pharisees, an ancient 
Jewish sect, strict in doctrine and ritual, without 
the spirit of piety; laying great stress upon the ex- 
ternal observances of religion and outward show of 
morality, and assuming superiority on that ac- 
count; hypocritical; formal; self-righteous.—NEW 
ENGLISH DICTIONARY. 

When we speak of Pharisaism we mean obedi- 
ence petrified into formalism, religion degraded 
into ritual, morals cankered by casuistry.—F'ARRAR’S 
ST. PAUL. 


INTRODUCTION 


| MONG many misconceptions and prejudices 


commonly held about the Jews none are more 

strongly felt and deeply rooted than those 
in regard to Pharisaism. From the time the New 
Testament was written there has been a black mark 
against the Pharisees, a mark which succeeding cen- 
turies have rather deepened than effaced. Most peo- 
ple think of the Pharisees (so far as they think of 
them at all) as the leaders of a sect in opposition 
to Jesus, the assailants whom he most severely de- 
nounced, a small class of narrow-minded people only 


[3] 


interesting or important because of their prominence 
in the Gospel story, and sufficiently described by the 
words “Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” Nor has 
this common opinion concerning the Pharisees been 
challenged by the learned world. Indeed there has 
not been—at least by non-Jewish scholars—until 
very recently anything approaching a serious attempt 
to inquire adequately into the actual historical char- 
acter of the Pharisees, their principles, aims, view- 
point and method, or to consider them impartially, 
not according to the representation of their oppo- 
nents, but in the light of their own literature, the 
teaching of their own leaders and learned men, and 
of unprejudiced historical testimony generally. 

The place of Pharisaism in history is much lar- 
ger and more important than is commonly under- 
stood and recognized. Pharisaism originally came 
into being as the reply of the Jewish people to the 
challenge of the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth 
century B. C. But its viewpoint and teachings gave 
such complete expression to the beliefs and ideas 
with which the main body of Jews were in sympathy 
that Pharisaism succeeded in permanently molding 
the future character of Judaism. There has been 
no period in which Judaism as a whole has departed 
from the main lines first traced by the Pharisees. 
The distinctive name has been long ago disused; 
but the Judaism which has come down through the 
centuries, from the rise of Christianity to the present 


[4] 


day, is in its essential features Pharisaism. Chris- 
tian scholars, therefore, depending usually on the 
New Testament, display a certain lack of propor- 
tion when they consider the Pharisees as merely a 
single small factor concerned in the ministry and 
death of Jesus, and confine their importance in his- 
tory to their connection with this one event. For 
to the Pharisees themselves, with their already long 
history, the appearance of Jesus and the fate that 
befell him had no such importance, and was hardly 
more than a passing incident. Such as they were, 
they continued to be for long ages after the death 
of Jesus; and to judge them merely by their rela- 
tion to that one event is to fail in the first essential 
of historical justice. 

This essay, therefore, proposes to treat the Phari- 
sees as a continuous body, an enduring element in 
the Jewish people; at first as one party in the nation 
in rivalry with another party, and later as the sole 
surviving party, when all the others had been, so to 
speak, left dead on the field after the last fatal fight 
with the enemy. The Pharisees alone carried forward 
the sacred treasure of the Jewish religion after the 
Temple had been destroyed and the land laid waste. 
All the Judaism which has come down to the present 
day owes its existence to the Pharisees, and if there 
is still abundant vitality in the Jewish religion it is 
the Pharisees who enabled it to endure. That is 
what really determines their place in history; and 
their unbroken continuance from the time of the 


[5] 


prophets to the time in which we now live is one indi- 
cation that their place is not insignificant amongst 
those who have shaped the course and influenced the 
doctrines of the human race. 


I. Historica. DEVELOPMENT OF PHARISAISM 


HE historical study of the origin and meaning 

of Pharisaism is rendered intricate and difficult 

by the scarcity of first-hand written documents about 
the period. ‘The Pharisees, we know, certainly arose 
within the times covered by the Old Testament writ- 
ings, for the actual composition of some of these 
writings and the collection and arrangement of them 
all as we now have them is their work. But the 
name Pharisee does not occur in the Old Testament. 
Our only sources, therefore, are Josephus, the New 
Testament and the Talmud, together with the rab- 
binical literature in general. None of these, cer- 
tainly not the first two, date back to the period of 
the rise of Pharisaism. The New Testament, more- 
over, describes them from the outside, and as seen 
by observers who did not love them. Josephus 
speaks of them in terms adapted to his Roman 
readers (and if he did not say so himself it would 
be hard to guess that he himself was, or had been, 
a Pharisee). The Talmud, however, is pure Phari- 
saism from end to end. Specific statement in the 
‘Talmud about the actual origin of the Pharisees is, 


[6] 


to be sure, scanty and legendary; but it is not diffi- 
cult to piece together from the many clues given in 
its pages a fair account of the early history of 
Pharisaism. For the Talmud is a self-revealed pic- 
ture of the Pharisees, of the ideals to which they 
looked up, the principles which they held and the 
modes of their thought and action. By inference 
from these we should be able to discover some in- 
dication of the way they came to be such as they 
are there beheld. 

Pharisaism was the reply made by the Jewish peo- 
ple to the challenge of the Babylonian captivity. 
The sharp discipline of the Exile taught the Jew 
that the Jewish religion, the worship and service of 
one God, must be kept free from idolatry, from the 
taint of the heathen cults of the neighboring peo- 
ple. This lesson was not at all new, since all the 
great prophets had taught it in their turn before 
the Exile. But the people whom the prophets ad- 
dressed had paid little attention; Yaveh might be 
all the prophets proclaimed him to be; but the peo- 
ple went after other gods also, and “burned incense 
to the Queen of Heaven.” But those who came back 
from Babylon came back with hearts purged of all 
desire to go astray after false gods. Few in num- 
ber and incapable of great achievement as the Jew- 
ish community in Palestine after the return was, yet 
its members seem to have done what they could to 
keep before their eyes the ideal of the pure religion 
of Yahveh. 


[7] 


FULL century passed before the man arose 

who effectively drove home the lesson of the 
Exile to the mind and heart of his countrymen. 
That man was Ezra and he is the real founder of 
Judaism in the strict sense of the term. 

The conventional judgment on Ezra is incorrect, 
according to which he turned away from the religion 
of the prophets and set the religious life of the 
Jewish people on the down-grade from the heights 
which the prophets had reached. For, in the first 
place, the people as a whole had never reached those 
heights; and in the second, Ezra never disowned for 
a moment the prophetic teaching. In fact his whole 
life work was to convince the people that they must 
obey those very teachings which the prophets had 
been unable to make them follow. It is Ezra’s 
achievement that, with some help from Nehemiah, 
the energetic governor of Jerusalem, and in the face 
of the severe opposition of the aristocracy, he was 
able finally to enlist a considerable majority of the 
Jewish community on his side for a thoroughgoing 
reconstruction of Jewish life. 

Ezra’s effort was first to establish the community 
as a “closed corporation” within a barrier which 
should separate them from their Gentile neighbors ; 
and, second, to proclaim for their guidance the reve- 
lation of the will of God made through Moses. This 
divine revelation was that contained in the five books 
ascribed to Moses, what is usually but quite wrongly 
called the Law. T'orah does not mean Law; it 


[8] 


means ‘Teaching and it includes (as understood by 
Jews) all that God has taught, revealed to man in 
general as well as to Israel, through Moses. (This 
article will therefore not allude to the five books of 
Moses as the Law. Instead the Hebrew designa- 
tion Torah will be left untranslated.) 

Ezra publicly read the books containing the 
Torah of Moses, and the people, through their chief 
rulers and heads of families, solemnly pledged 
themselves to accept it and obey its precepts. This 
is the famous assembly described in Nehemiah ix, 
an event of enormous importance for the subsequent 
history of the Jewish people and marking the definite 
triumph of the principles and policy of Ezra. When 
Ezra passed from the scene he left behind him in 
the minds of a majority of the community the set- 
tled purpose of living separate from the Gentiles 
under the consecration of the Torah. 

Although the name Pharisee does not appear un- 
til three centuries after the time of Ezra it was not 
without reason that the Pharisees looked upon Ezra 
as their “patron saint.” For Pharisaism when it 
did appear served only to bring out into greater 
clearness and with more emphasis the principles of 
exclusion and of the supremacy of the Torah—was, 
indeed, only an improved technique for the fullest 
development of these ideals. These three centuries 
between the time of Ezra and the definite appearance 
of the Pharisees under that name were devoted to 
the working out of the practical application of Ezra’s 


[9] 


principles to the daily life of the people. The Torah 
had been declared the supreme authority and the 
guide of life, but it was necessary that it be inter- 
preted, correlated, explained so as to make its teach- 
ing applicable to changing conditions of life and 
circumstances not expressly provided for. 'To do 
this work arose the Sopherim, the Scribes, a title 
borne by Ezra himself. | 

The earliest Sopherim were probably for the most 
part priests, with whom were associated some Levites, 
and their first teaching must have been of the sim- 
plest character, hardly more than a statement of 
the lesson to be deduced from such and such a text. 
But it served its purpose if it brought the practical 
needs of life, religious and civil, individual and so- 
cial, into relation with the word of the Torah. 
Moreover, since unrelated individual interpretations 
by single scribes would obviously lack consistency, 
agreement, and therefore authority, an effort was 
early made at some co-operation and consultation 
among them. What organized form this collabora- 
tion took is not known. If there was nothing as 
definite as a constituted assembly or council, at 
least there must have been some means for attaining 
agreement of authority. This is what probably 
underlies the allusions in the rabbinical literature to 
the Men of the Great Synagog, who in one passage 
at all events (‘Tanhuma, Beshall, p. 42*) are expressly 
identified with the Sopher. At any rate the So- 


pherim, whatever their organization, carried on their 


[10] 


work for several generations after Ezra. The death 
of Simon the Just, 270 B. C., marked the end of 
the period of the Sopherim and there is no clear evi- 
dence to show what was done in the matter of reli- 
gious teaching until the establishment of the San- 
hedrin, or Supreme Council, some time about the 


year 196 B. C. 


HE formation of the Sanhedrin, which included 
laymen as well as priests and Levites and which 
dealt with political as well as religious questions, 
brought into view a certain significant divergence in 
the way the Torah had come to be regarded. On 
the one hand there were the priests, anxious to 
maintain ther own privileges as monopolists of re- 
ligious teaching, and the rulers, faced with the ne- 
cessity of dealing with political questions and bent 
on preserving their own authority from the encroach- 
ments of the Torah; and these two groups united 
in an endeavor to limit the scope of the Torah to 
the explicit statements of the written text, under- 
stood in their literal meaning. ‘The people’s oath 
bound them to obey these and only these. ‘Things 
not contained in the Torah, yet needful or desirable, 
were provided for by ordinances, gazeroth, issued 
by the priests from time to time, by virtue of the 
authority conferred upon them in the Torah itself 
(Deut. xvii, 3). The consequence of this tendency 
would have been to make the Torah obsolete, since 
with the lapse of time its precepts would become more 


[11] 


and more impossible of fulfilment. The real au, 
thority would then pass into the hands of the priestly 
clique and the ruling class. 

An opposing party, however, formed by reaction 
from the principle just described, held that the 
true meaning of the Torah was not defined by the 
text taken literally but could only be ascertained 
when the text was rightly interpreted, and, fur- 
ther, that the right interpretation was to be found 
in unwritten or oral tradition. ‘This liberal concep- 
tion of the Torah was supported chiefly by the com- 
mon lay members of the community, who had no 
share in political affairs and whose chief concern was 
the religious welfare of the common people through 
the adoption of the Torah as a practical guide and 
rule of life. Conditioned by this practical necessity 
the Torah was to be made flexible enough to apply 
to all the changing conditions of the life of the com- 
munity. In consequence the Torah was saved from 
dying of mere old age; it was transformed from an 
ancient record into a living force; it was exalted so 
as to become the vehicle of the whole revelation which 
God had given to Israel and the means by which the 
line of communication between God and Israel was 
kept open for all time. 

These two tendencies or schools of thought did 
not emerge as definite political parties with distin- 
guishing names until the establishment of the inde- 
pendent Jewish national state (about 150 B. C.) as 


[12] 


the result of the Maccabean revolt against the rule 
and influence of Hellenism. When Jonathan, Simon, 
and especially John Hyrcanus, all of the Maccabean 
family, destroyed the domination of the Greeks, 
they left the Jews free to solve their own political 
and religious problems in their own way, and in the 
light of their own best traditions. The two tenden- 
cies already discussed were representative of the most 
complete theories of Jewish life and formed an ob- 
vious contrast; they became at once, therefore, the 
two most important and powerful parties in the state, 
and held that position until the final catastrophe in 
the war of Bar-Cochba in the year 135 C. E. The 
names of the two opposing parties were the Saddu- 
cees and the Pharisees. ‘The Sadducees were those 
who combined respect for the Torah, the ancient 
text literally understood, with an active concern for 
political affairs and closer relation with the Gentiles. 
The Pharisees were those who maintained the reli- 
gion of Torah as the one supreme concern of vital 
importance for the Jews, who looked with disfavor 
upon foreign entanglements and secular interests 
in conflict with Torah. 

In principle and theory the Pharisees as they 
finally and definitely emerged were the inevitable 
consequence of earlier religious teaching; the name 
of the party, however, presents considerable diffi- 
culty and is probably after all only an accidental 
accretion, since it is in no particular sense an ex- 
pression of the main Pharisaic principles. How then 


[13] 


did the name Pharisee originate? First, it should 
be noted that while the Pharisees were rivals and op- 
ponents of the Sadducees, their distinctive name had 
no reference whatever to the Sadducees or to their 
rivalry with that party. Second, the Pharisees 
themselves did not use the name habitually to de- 
scribe themselves. They usually referred to them- 
selves as The Wise or The Wise of Israel. The word 
Pharisee—in Hebrew pharush, in Aramaic pharish— 
means “separated.” But apparently the term does 
not refer to the general Pharisaic principle of sepa- 
ration, but to an individual application of that prin- 
ciple in a single historical instance. ‘This event was 
the formation under the impulse of John Hyrcanus 
(135-106 B. C.) of a voluntary association of re- 
ligious-minded persons pledged to the strict obsery- 
ance of many then frequently violated principles of 
the Torah. ‘There were four grades in this asso- 
ciation in accordance with the strictness of their ob- 
servance. ‘The lowest grade was called that of the 
Perushim or Pharisees. And they were obviously so 
called because, being of the lowest grade in the as- 
sociation and thus nearest to the common people, 
the Am-ha-aretz, they marked the line of separation 
between the strict observer and the ordinary people 
of the land. Later, by a natural transition the name 
was used in the more general sense of a follower of 
the Torah, in contrast to an adherent of priestly 
and leviatical ordinances. 


[14] 


HE Pharisees became, then, the repositories of 

the religious ideals of the community. They 
were never a party in the sense of a group of men 
interested in national aggrandizement and _ political 
achievement. They were rather an association 
pledged to the perpetuation and dissemination of 
religious sentiments and moral practices. And al- 
though the Pharisees very seldom held supreme 
power in the state, they represented a substantial, 
continuous and enduring element which, in the com- 
plete ruin of the political and national parties of 
the Jewish state, still had enough numerical strength 
and steadfastness of heart to ensure the perpetua- 
tion of Judaism purely as a religious community. 
From the defeat of Bar-Cochba to very recent times , 
national and political ideals have held very little in- | 
terest for the Jewish people; Judaism as it has sur- 
vived through the ages has been _ essentially 
Pharisaism. 

The success of Pharisaism in educating a great 
number of the Jewish people in practices which made 
for isolation from the pagan world and consecration 
to the Torah was due to a large extent to their con- 
nection with the institution of the Synagog; it was 
through this that the Pharisees were enabled to come 
into close relations with the main body of the com- 
mon people. The Pharisees were, it is true, not the 
founders of the Synagog; that institution probably 
originated as early as the Exile (586 B. C.). But 


when the Pharisees began to emerge as a definite 


[15] 


group in the state they were quick to recognize 
the close bond of sympathy between their own ideals 
and those of the Synagog, as well as its great pos- 
sibilities for the future. For the Synagog, too, had 
always aimed to be the home and center of the re- 
ligion of Torah. Those who gathered in its walls 
came with two objects: to worship God by praise 
and prayer; and to study the Torah, by learning or 
teaching the lessons to be derived from it. 

The Synagog made no attempt to imitate the 
Temple, and had always a different aim in view. 
There was only one Temple; there were scores and 
hundreds of synagogs, and they were to be found in 
every town and village in the land. ‘The Temple, 
as long as it stood, was the visible expression of the 
religion of the whole Jewish people collectively; but 
the Synagog was the expression of their religion day 
by day and week by week for Jews not collectively, 
but as friends and neighbors, dwellers in the same 
locality. ‘The Temple was in far-away Jerusalem; 
the Synagog was at their very door. Therefore, it 
could and did exert a powerful influence in de- 
veloping the religion of the ordinary people by 
bringing it to bear upon the common concerns and 
experiences that made up their daily life. As this 
was precisely what the Pharisees were most desirous 
of doing it was only natural that the Pharisees 
should be the warmest friends and strongest sup- 
porters of the Synagog. The Pharisees, indeed, to- 
gether with the Scribes, soon took over its develop- 


[16] 


ment, arranged the order of its services, collected 
its sacred books (those books which together we now 
call the Old Testament), and gave religious teach- 
ing to the people assembled to hear. The Synagog 
became a layman’s church, free from the domination 
of priests, functionnmg in fact without anything 
which can be called a clergy. And it was because 
of the Pharisees’ many services to the Synagog that 
the people felt a bond between themselves and the 
Pharisees; reverenced, loved and followed them as 
their teachers and leaders and friends. It was these 
people of the Synagog, steadfast in the life of Torah 
which the Pharisees had taught them, who saved 
Judaism when the nationalist policy ended in vain 
and Palestine as a political entity disappeared. 


HE crisis which finally led to the adoption by 

the Jewish people of the ideals which were to 
guide them for centuries to come was precipitated 
by the reign of Herod (87-4 B. C.). Under his 
long, masterful, and unsympathetic rule a number 
of widely divergent groups had sprung up, pre- 
senting a much more complicated situation than the 
earlier simple rivalry between Pharisee and Saddu- 
cee. These new groups, moreover, were not anta- 
gonistic in the sense of parties fighting for political 
control of the state, but were opposed only because 
they represented different reactions against the 
tyranny of Herod. Their policies were but theories 
of defense and survival, with the purpose of enabling 


[17] 


the Jew to survive in the face of a common and 
cruel enemy. ‘The Pharisees, still a large and pow- 
erful group true to their ancient traditions, offered 
the non-political solution of non-resistance, and fol- 
lowed the line of the older Hassidim in insisting that 
the continued life of the Jew depended on his pur- 
suing in peace and quietness the religious life in ac- 
cordance with the Torah. ‘They were in the truest 
sense a peace party. ‘Their policy of patient sub- 
mission however did not satisfy all. There was a 
group, later called the Essenes, who deeming it im- 
possible to endure when no prospect of relief was 
to be seen, withdrew into lonely desert places where 
they could live in peace and give themselves to un- 
disturbed piety, unremitting devotion to the Torah, 
and a life of strict asceticism. At the other ex- 
treme from the pacific attitude of the Pharisees 
were the Zealots, passionate followers of the Torah, 
too, but men who gloried in the tradition of the 
Maccabeans and believed that the time had come to 
fight. ‘The Torah, they said, must and could be 
defended, but only by throwing off the yoke of the 
Edomite king and defying all Gentile oppressors— 
even Rome itself, if need be, in the name of the God 
of Israel. The “wild men” of the Jewish community, 
they spoke constantly of war; and fired by a fana- 
tical devotion to the national religion and the dream 
of national freedom, against which all argument was 
powerless, they called the nation again and again 
to arms. ‘ 


[18] 


The Pharisees, as is the fate of the more level- 
headed parties in time of great national excitement, 
found their authority considerably weakened by de- 
fections to the more extreme and active groups. At 
no time however, so writes Josephus after the fall of 
Jerusalem, did they lose the esteem and reverence 
of the majority of the people. They used all their 
influence to prevent a war with the Romans; and 
when they were finally dragged into it against their 
will by the Zealots they could only wait till the fury 
of the storm had spent itself. 

And so it was in the last rash adventure, when 
Bar-Cochba led the Jews in their desperate attempt 
to win back their freedom, in that glorious but fatal 
revolt that marked the total overthrow of the Jewish 
state. The national life of the Jews and with it all 
possibility of existence under normal political ideals 
disappeared in that disaster; and if Israel had fol- 
lowed the example of other conquered peoples, the 
Jewish civilization might easily have vanished. In 
that great crisis Judaism was saved from dissolution 
only because the Pharisees were able to offer an al- 
ternate way of life, capable of perpetuating Jewish 
civilization without the political sovereignty that the 
Jews no longer possessed. 

The Judaism which has come down through the 
centuries is substantially the Judaism of the Phari- 
sees. Judaism has undergone many changes in 
these centuries, has developed new forms, produced 
new results, adapted itself to new conditions, but 


[19] 


it has remained throughout true to one fundamental 
vital principle—that of applying the divine reve- 
lation of the Torah to the whole range of life. 

What was once the Jewish community settled in 
its own land is now a scattered multitude dispersed 
through well nigh every country in the civilized 
world. No political bond holds them together ; there 
is no means by which they can formulate or carry 
out a common policy even if they should wish to do 
so. Least of all are they the powerful secret society 
which some have supposed them to be. They have 
no such united political influence, nor would the 
thought of exerting such an influence ever possess 
any attraction for them. ‘That which has enabled 
them to survive is the old religious ideal to which 
the Pharisees first gave full expression, and this en- 
abled them to survive in undiminished strength be- 
cause their ideal was not dependent on political or- 
ganization for its fulfilment. 

Thus the Jews have remained, persecuted but not 
destroyed, victims of the manifold dislike and _ ill- 
will of the nations in whose midst they lived, pursu- 
ing aims which were seldom understood, with pecu- 
liarities of observance which exposed them to ridicule, 
doubtless with some faults and failings of their own 
—what people has not?—and certainly with others 
bred in them by the treatment they have received 
at the hands of professing Christians. Beneath all 
the external appearance of Judaism, unlovely and 
repellent as it may sometimes appear to the outsider, 


[20] 


there has always dwelt and still dwells in its inmost 
heart, cherished there with devout and reverent love, 
the Torah as God’s most precious gift to his people 
and the hope and longing for that day when in the 
recognition and faithful service of all his children 
on earth “the Lord shall be One and his name One.” 


Il. Tue Pornt or View or THE PHARISEES 


AVING traced the historical development of 

Pharisaism, a fuller understanding requires 
a more careful and detailed examination of what 
might be called the Pharisaic attitude to life: its 
impulses and motives, its intentions, its procedure 
and policies, and their consequences for the history 
of the Jews and the religious development of man- 
kind. Necessities of space exclude many questions 
that might properly call for attention in a mono- 
graph of the Pharisees; but there are certain as- 
pects of the subject which seem especially worthy 
of consideration, the more so since it is on those 
points that common opinion is least favorable to the 
Pharisees. 

What precisely did the Pharisees set themselves 
to achieve and how did they go about accomplishing 
their self-assigned duty? ‘Their main task, as they 
conceived it, was, specifically, to establish the au- 
thority of the Torah as the full and inexhaustible 
revelation made by God to man. By the Torah they 


[21] 


meant, of course, not merely the written word of the 
“Five Books of Moses” but the inner meaning of 
what was there written; and the source of that right 
interpretation was held by the Pharisees to be oral 
tradition, assumed to have been imparted to Moses 
and unfolded into fuller detail by successive teachers 
ever since. In addition, the other Scriptures now 
forming the Old Testament were held to be further 
elucidations of the Torah, minor rays of the heavenly 
light whose chief focus was the Five Books. ‘This 
divine revelation, moreover, was not conceived to 
have ceased with its formulation in the words of the 
Scriptures, but was thought of as always fresh and 
always growing because God enlightened the minds 
of men in every age to receive more of what he would 
teach. This theory of the Torah was expressed 
under the form of interpretation of the ancient text 
and it was made effective by means of an exegesis 
which defied all ordinary rules of grammar and syn- 
tax. Nevertheless it was done in all sincerity and 
done for the purpose of harmonizing the ancient text 
with the deeper insight and higher thoughts of the 
Jewish mind as it increased in wisdom and knowl- 
edge of God. This liberal and evolutionary concept 
of the authority of the Scriptures was perhaps the 
most distinctive contribution of the Pharisees jto 
the common stock of the religious thought of man- 
kind at large. 

It belongs to the irony of history that the Phari- 
sees should be charged with a bigoted and_ stiff- 


[22] 


necked hardening and sterilizing of the religion of 
the Jews when it was they, as contrasted with the 
Sadducees and other literalists, and they alone, who 
gave it the flexibility and adaptability of spirit that 
enabled it to live and to survive. 


| Rea tase area as this conception was merely 
as an intellectual contribution, the Pharisees 
were not satisfied to allow it to remain a mere thought 
without practical application, a purely speculative 
opinion having no direct bearing on life. Their 
chief interest had been from the beginning a prac- 
tical one; the chief end of man was, they insisted, 
not merely to know what the Torah contained, to 
have a perception of the existence of a divine com- 
mand, but rather to recognize the supreme duty of 
doing the will of God as expressed in the injunctions 
of the Torah. Actual day by day observance of the 
precepts of the Torah was taken to be the chief 
responsibility both of the community as a whole and 
of every member in particular. Obviously much 
study, interpretation and instruction was necessary 
before the Torah could serve as a complete guide 
for life. The first step, in what was a long process, 
was to take specific note of the actions which were 
expressly stated in so many words: ‘Thou shalt’ 
or “Thou shalt not.” These definite precepts, posi- 
tive or negative, are called Mitzvoth, and it was the 
duty of the Jew who would live in obedience to the 
Torah to fulfil all the Mitzvoth which came his way. 


[23] 


His feeling was: ‘Under these circumstances I am 
commanded in the Torah to do so and so. It is God’s 
will that I should do so; in doing this particular 
thing in the appointed way I am obeying God.” 
But suppose no direction was given in the Torah 
as to how the Mitzvah was to be performed? Or 
again, suppose a case arose for which there was no 
express command, no precise Mitzvah? How was the 
Torah to be obeyed, how was the will of God to be 
done in such a case? Answers to such questions were 
found by interpreting the Torah, by inferring, from 
what it did say in one case, what it would have said 
in another case, if it had happened to deal with that 
other case. Here is precisely the point at which 
Pharisee and Sadducee parted company. ‘The Sad- 
ducee said the Torah had nothing more to teach 
than the literal meaning expressed in its written 
words. Things not stated in the ancient text might 
be done by special ordinance of the priests; but 
such ordinances were not Torah and did not claim 
to be. The Pharisees, on the other hand, admitted 
no distinction in degree of authority between the 
Torah itself and the interpretation of the Torah 
added by unwritten tradition. For the process of 
making the written text clear and precise where it 
was vague and indefinite seemed to the Pharisee, in- 
tent always on his ethical purpose, as necessary and 
as holy as the original transcription of the Torah. 
The duty of man was to obey God; therefore there 
must be for every act of his life a way, discoverable 


[24] 


to man by careful thinking and mature deliberation, 
of fulfilling the will of God by some specific rule 
of right conduct. The results of the interpretations 
of the Torah made in this spirit were formulated in 
rules; such a rule of right conduct was called a 
Halachah. The word halach in Hebrew means “to 
walk”; one of its commonest uses in the Old Testa- 
ment is in phrases where the duty of a man who 
would serve God is said to be ‘to walk’ in his 
statutes or according to his Torah. The transition 
is an obvious one. ‘To the Pharisee any direction 
given by a competent authority intended to teach 
a man how he should “walk” if he would obey the 
Torah was a Halachah, a rule of right conduct. 
The Halachah was never determined by an in- 
dividual by himself, no matter what his wisdom. The 
Halachah was declared only after a consultation 
among the teachers, and decided by a vote of the 
majority in order that in a matter of so great im- 
portance, affecting the life and actions of the whole 
community, the final decision should represent the 
opinion and carry the authority of the wisest, most 
learned and most experienced scholars, acting in their 
capacity as trustees of the people. Furthermore, 
it was so obviously to the interest of the community 
to preserve the Halachah, when defined by compe- 
tent authorities, as guides for future «generations, 
that a number of such definitive judgments came to be 
remembered and handed down from one generation of 
teachers to another. This procedure, dating from the 


[25] 


very early days of the Sopherim, was the beginning 
of a tradition of Halachah (referred to in the New 
Testament as the “Tradition of the Elders”) which 
was later embodied in the Mishnah and its commen- 
tary, the Gemara, both together forming the Tal- 
mud. The Scribes of the Pharisees, as they are 
termed in the New Testament, that is, the accredited 
teachers of the Pharisees, were instrumental also in 
producing another work, similar in method but dif- 
ferent in content, the Haggadah. ‘The Halachah 
dealt, it will be remembered, with only one element 
in the Torah, viz: its precepts, commands, injunc- 
tions. But the Torah contained also teachings on 
other subjects, as the nature of God, his providence, 
and other phases of religious doctrines as contrasted 
with precept. The interpretation of these passages 
in the Torah formed the basis of this other work 
called the Haggadah, from the Hebrew word mean- 
ing “announcement,” “declaration.” Haggadah is 
probably the more general and earlier term, and in 
that case it referred to all interpretation of the 
Torah until the time when a special term—Hala- 
chah—was devised for the preceptive teaching. The 
initiating of these great works, both animated by 
the same spirit, was the most important specific 
achievement of the Pharisees. Through them they 
were enabled to enlarge and to develop the Torah 
so asi to make the teaching therein contained of im- 
mediate practical service in the religious life of the 
Jewish community. 


[26] 


The impulse and motives underlying Pharisaism 
should be by now so clear as to make further dis- 
cussion necessary. But there is a persistent mis- 
conception that it worth the moment’s notice sufh- 
cient to refute it. The chief desire of the Phari- 
sees was, one hears repeatedly, superciliously to with- 
draw from contact with humanity at large; their 
impulse a_ self-righteous, holier-than-thou disdain 
for-rival cultures. ‘That the Pharisees preached iso- 
lation is true, but the separation they sought was 
more than an attitude cherished for its own intrinsic 
worth. Separation was for them a practical mat- 
ter of self-defense impelled by their burning desire 
to preserve the existence of the Jew and safeguard 
his splendid heritage, the Torah. ‘The Torah was 
to the Pharisee a possession of such precious worth 
and the duty of abiding by its precepts a duty of 
such supreme concern that he dared not risk the in- 
filtration of pagan customs and practices inevitable 
in close association with the Gentile world. ‘The 
motive that animated the Pharisaic policy of isola- 
tion was exactly the same as that from which all its 
activities sprung—the desire to make manifest the 
divine revelation of the Torah in the daily business 
of man. 


HAT, finally, were the ultimate effects of the 
Pharisaic spirit and policy of Judaism? <A 
somewhat roundabout method, but one as good as 
any, would be to consider critically some of the com- 


[27] 


eee + 


mon misstatements about the effects of Pharisaismm, 
with the hope that in the process of refuting these 
misapprehensions a positive picture of the true 
achievements of the Pharisees will block itself out. 
A common condemnation of Pharisaism is that it 
led to a falling away, a decadence from the inspired 
exhortations of the great prophets. The contrast 
is drawn between the free utterance of the prophet 
with his “Thus saith the Lord,” and the constrained 
pronouncement of the Rabbi: ‘Thus it is written” 
or “Thus the sages have taught.” Certainly the 
contrast is clear; but the difference will be found on 
examination to be not one of ideals and beliefs, but 
merely one of the form and method of imparting 
these beliefs. ‘The prophets in their magnificent 
declamations about God, his righteousness and power 
and wisdom and justice, raised the religious concep- 
tions of Israel to the highest point they ever at- 
tained; but we do not read that people who heard 
the words of the prophets took them to heart and 
amended their lives in consequence. The great need 
was for some method by which the teaching of the 
prophets could be put into practice. This method, 
as we have seen, the Pharisees developed. Certainly 
there is no breach with prophetic teachings in the 
Pharisaic exaltation of the Torah, since both alike 
aim at obedience to the will of God; nor is there evi- 
dence to show that the Pharisees ever thought of 
contradicting or supplanting the prophetic teach- 
ings. Pharisaism is “applied prophecy.” Nothing 


[28] 


else than that is meant by the famous saying in the 
Talmud (B. Bath 12*) that “prophecy was taken 
from the prophets and given to the wise,’”——mean- 
ing the Rabbis. The Pharisees came after the 
prophets “not to destroy but to fulfil.” To ‘say, 
then, that the Pharisees, who were precisely those 
who saved the work of the prophets from being in 
vain, represented a debasement of prophecy is an 
obvious misstatement. 

A second imputation about the Pharisees (impor- 
tant because it expresses what a great majority of 
Christians, on the warrant of the New Testament, 
believe to be true about the Pharisees) is that they 
made religion into a hard system of rules, and the 
service of God into the performance of prescribed 
acts instead of a free expression of inward devotion 
and the willing obedience to conscience; that this 
system of rules (called always by Christians ‘“‘the 
Law’) was a heavy burden on the Jew from which 
no release was possible except through the influence 
of the Gospel; that, finally, the practice of Phari- 
saism led to hypocrisy, an outward show of piety 
with no corresponding inward sincerity. In attempt- 
ing to answer this grave accusation let us note that 
the sources of these judgments are confessedly hos- 
tile ones; Jesus and his disciples were Jews but not 
Pharisees. The attitude of the New Testament 
writers in general and Paul in particular was defin- 
itely antagonistic. Later writers in the Christian 


[29] 


Church were not only biased, but completely ignor- 
ant of the system they condemned. 

As to this alleged hardening and sterilizing of 
religion, under the tyranny of the “Law” (Chris- 
tian writers insist on rendering “Torah” by “Law” ; 
this single mistranslation of the Hebrew word mean- 
ing “‘teaching” is actually the source of the innu- 
merable condemnations of Judaism as a “legalistic” 
religion): if the effect of the “Law” was to kill re- 
ligion, how explain the full vigor of the Synagog 
in the time of Jesus, since the existence of the Syna- 
gog more than any other religious institution of 
the Jew depended on the spontaneous religious spirit 
of the people? How explain that it was the custom 
of Jesus himself to go there on the Sabbath? Nor 
is there any record of the Synagog, with its vital 
concern for religion, ever protesting against the 
Torah; the Torah and the Synagog in point of fact 
went hand in hand. Did this union engender a 
sterile Judaism? When one realizes that in the wor- 
ship of the Synagog the Psalms, the greatest purely 
devotional literature in the world, held a foremost 
place, this assumption becomes absurd. If the men 
of the Synagog were cold legalists would they have 
included the Psalms in their services to be a standing 
rebuke to their hollow pretensions of piety? The 
truth is that the men of the Synagog and the Phari- 
sees who directed its activities included the Psalms 
because they loved them and felt, as worshippers in 
all ages since have felt, their incomparable power 


[30] 


as devotional songs. But admitting this, is it still 
not true that the Pharisaic system included the Ha- 
lachah, and was this not a rigid law binding the 
entire community to precise, prescribed and me- 
chanical observances? On the contrary, it can be stated 
categorically, the Halachah always emphasized the 
intention behind the act, which was to perform the 
will of God, and never its merely perfunctory per- 
formance. The opus operatwm counted for nothing, 
the mere doing of the prescribed act without the in- 
tention of serving God had no religious worth, the 
spirit animating the deed was the all important con- 
sideration. Nor did the Pharisee stress greatly the 
possibilities of accumulating “rewards” and “merits” ; 
his aim was to do the will of God for its own sake. 
The Halachah indeed! was intended to serve as a 
complete guide of life, and to offer as far as possible 
a detailed authoritative regimen by which the Jew 
could consecrate his daily life to the service of God’s 
will, Any theory involving a definite and codified 
system of practice is open to the grave danger that 
the outward act is performed without the inward 
purpose, with the result of formalism and hypocrisy. 
The Pharisees were fully aware of this danger and 
were always especially concerned to guard themselves 
against it. Human nature being what it is, there 
are in all religions those who take religion too lightly, 
those who care too much for mere form and too 
little for the inner spirit, and it is not true that the 
Pharisees are more inclined to be hypocrites than the 


[31] 


eens a 


ae 


adherents of other religions. A hostile observer is 
never in a position to form a right judgment of a 
rival religion by a causal inspection of its observ- 
ances. A ceremony will seem meaningless and me- 
chanical to him, as most of the observances of the 
Pharisees probably did to their critics—because he 
has no way of knowing the inner spring impelling 
the outward show. It is not difficult to understand 
how an outsider, seeing the Pharisee perform his 
elaborate ritual, and being unable to read the inner 
heart of the devotee, could rush out and brand him 
hypocrite. 


THIRD common objection to Pharisaism is 

that the system of Halachah weakened the sense 
of moral responsibility of its adherents; the Jew 
was not free to act from his own conscience but 
must conform to an external rule. The force of 
this objection is considerably lessened when it is re- 
membered that the Jew has always regarded moral 
obligation more from the point of view of the com- 
munity than from that of the individual. The main 
factor in his decision as to the morality of any par- 
ticular act was the thought that he was a member 
of the community of Israel, not a mere isolated being. 
If, therefore, he saw that the consensus of the rep- 
resentative leaders and teachers of the community 
had established the morality of an action, he sel- 
dom found himself in a moral conflict with Halachah 
on one side and conscience on the other. A proof 


[32] 


of this fact is that in all the rabbinical literature 
familiar to the writer he is unable to recall a single 
instance of such a conflict between conscience and 
Halachah, or any reference to the question. How- 
ever that may be, it is beyond question that the ethi- 
cal sensitiveness of the Jewish mind was not weakened 
or blighted by the Halachah. Ethics has been the 
subject of more devoted study among Jews in the 
direct line of Pharisaism than any other department 
of thought; anyone who knows the rabbinical litera- 
ture knows well the fine ethical spirit and delicate 
moral perception that marks its best teaching; 
knows also that its development of the ethical teach- 
ings of the Old Testament was always towards a 
higher and not toward a lower degree of refinement 
and purity. The actual effect of the Halachah was 
to provide not only a training of character, a dis- 
cipline of mind and heart and a system of guide and 
control, accepted voluntarily and maintained only 
by social opinion, but to serve also to hold the Jewish 
community together as a distinct entity when every 
other bond of national life had been broken. 

My hope has been by these refutations of com- 
mon misunderstandings to build up simultaneously 
the positive outlines of the Pharisaic point of view. 
Little more is needed now correctly to assess the 
value of Pharisaism to the Jew. That consists 
chiefly, to repeat, in its having provided a means of 
survival to the Jew. Ezra saved Judaism from de- 
cay at the time of the Exile by proclaiming the 


[33] 


Torah the supreme religious authority, and gathered 
to it a body of pledged adherents and resolute and 
devoted defenders. ‘The Pharisees, followimg in his 
footsteps, saved Judaism from paralysis by their in- 
spired system of adapting the ‘Torah to the practi- 
cal problems of daily life. ‘Those who have con- 
demned Pharisaism and deplored its existence have 
not pointed out any other method that ought to have 
been adopted; and, in any case, the fact remains 
that of the forms of Judaism only Pharisaism was 
able to survive the two great crises of Jewish his- 
tory. That Pharisaism was able to save Judaism 
to a world that needs it gives it a claim to an ap- 
proving verdict from the history of civilization. 


III. PHaARIsAISM AND CHRISTIANITY 


HE significance of Pharisaism in the reli- 

gious development of mankind consists pre- 
cisely in the part that Judaism, as we know it, has 
played in this development; for Judaism as it has 
survived is pure Pharisaism. Whatever gifts Juda- 
ism has brought to the spiritual life of humanity, 
these are in truth Pharisaic contributions. <A fruit- 
ful method of appraising these ideals of Pharisaism 
or Judaism (as you will) and their gonsequences, is 
to consider them in their relationship to the ideals 
and achievements of Christianity. These two. reli- 
gious systems have confronted each other for nine- — 


[34] 


teen centuries, have influenced each other  pro- 
foundly, both internally and externally, and_ still 
exist. side by side, offering rival divine revelations, 
and apparently no nearer to a reconciliation than 
they were at the beginning. 

Our effort shall be to define their characteristic 
traits, compare their ideals and practices, trace their 
relation to each other, and finally to try to point out 
what their places have been in the religious disci- 
pline of humanity, and to forecast, as well as one 
can, their future part in the religious life of the 
world. 

We shall not endeavor to assign the relative merits 
of the two religions—who is there, indeed, who has 
‘the right to judge? Superficial and misinformed 
Christian apologists have been satisfied to seize upon 
certain aspects of Judaism, which they had no means 
of understanding, and to draw from these various 
comfortable inferences as to the alleged inferiority 
of Judaism to Christianity. These scholars point 
to the Halachah, with its minute definition of trifling 
acts, and its reduction, as they conceive it, of reli- 
gion to a,mass of formality. Paul, they say, rid 
the world of this burden; he struck off the chains 
that fettered the free play of the individual religious 
spirit. But is it not true that when the Christian 
Church, soon after, found itself in a position very 
similar to that of the Pharisees, in need of a bond to 
hold its adherents together in a religious community, it 
also developed a system of constraint? The con- 


[35] 


fession of faith and the whole mass of speculative 
theology developed from the Creed as a method of 
coercion on the members of the Church is open to 
exactly the criticism by which the Halachah is dis- 
paraged. Here is a case where the retort is justified, 
“Physician, heal thyself.” 

The real distinction between Judaism (as em- 
bodied in Pharisaism) and Christianity (as taught 
by the missionaries of the Church), as they confront- 
ed each other, was a fundamental one, fraught with 
far-reaching consequences for their mutual relation- 
ship. As systems they were fundamentally dissimilar, 
wholly incommensurable and completely impossible of 
harmonization in a single religious scheme. ‘That is 
the final answer (if one is needed) why Christianity 
has never been able to assimilate Judaism. Judaism, 
as has been stated, is a detailed system of ethical 
practices by which its adherents consecrated their 
daily lives to the service of God. ‘The cornerstone of 
Judaism was the deed, not the dogma. The funda- 
mental characteristic of Christianity, as it was 
preached by the apostles, and as it is embodied to- 
day in both the Protestant and the Catholic Churches 
was, on the other hand, faith in a Person, that per- — 
son being, of course, the Founder. “Believe in the 
Lord Jesus,” says Christianity, “and thou shalt be 
saved.” Salvation for professing Christians is not 
a consequence of duty done in the conscious service 
of God; it is something mystically recetved as a gift 
of divine grace. Christ was regarded as an agent 


[36] 


in a mysterious transaction whereby a divine pur- 
pose of redemption by love had been accomplished. 
by a personal sacrifice, the benefits of which were 
open to all those who were willing but to signify 
their faith in him. Christianity and Judaism ap- 
pealed to different sides of human nature; the for- 
mer to the passive side, the latter to the active side. 
Christianity stressed faith, Judaism right action. 
Christianity preached a mystical communion through 
faith with a divine power by which the evils of life 
disappear without any effort of the personal will. 
Judaism insisted on the conscious individual conse- 
cration of each single human being by thought and 
will and act to the service of his God. 

This contrast is, of course, not complete, nor is 
the conflict between Christianity and Judaism that 
of two independently conceived and mutually exclu- 
sive systems. For Christianity when it first appeared 
in a complete form included in it many details and 
ideals borrowed from the Pharisees, and then di- 
verted to Christian uses. Christianity is, to be sure, 
more closely akin to the apocalyptic type of Juda- 
ism, but its debt to the Pharisees is by no means in- 
considerable. Christianity, for instance, owes much 
to that great Pharisaic institution, the Synagog, 
whereby it was able to foster religion on the lines 
of personal piety without priest and without ritual; 
was indebted to the Pharisees, in fact, not only for 
the form but for the very idea of congregational 
worship. Again, it was the Pharisees of the older 


[37] 


time who collected the Hebrew Scriptures, which the 
Church appropriated to her own use, never even 
saying “By your leave,” and denying that the Jews 
had henceforth any right to them; and _ without 
which Christianity would have lacked the chief 
means of proving to the Gentiles the truth of 
its message. Further, the general ethical teach- 
ing taken over into Christianity was substantially 
that of the Pharisees, though not exclusively so. 
The fact that certain common factors exist in 
Pharisaism and Christianity does not, however, blur 
the fundamental distinction between these systems 
pointed out above. The Christian conception was 
so completely at variance with Pharisaic ideals that 
whatever Pharisaic doctrines it chose to borrow suf- 
fered a complete transmutation due to the radical 
shifting of emphasis inevitable in their incorpora- 
tion into Christian doctrine. ‘The breach between 
Judaism and Christianity was made final by the pre- 
eminent place which Christianity, for the purpose 
of strengthening its central teaching, gave to a 
whole mass of doctrine completely alien to Judaism 
and borrowed from various Greek, Roman and 
Oriental cults and mysteries; dogmas such as those 
of sacrifice, vicarious atonement, salvation through 
the voluntary death of a savior of divine origin. 
Christianity, then, though it embodied many: old 
Hebraic ideals, was in effect a new religion, a com- 
pletely novel and revolutionary statement of the rela- 
tionship between Man and God. And the repudia- 


[38] 


tion of Christianity by the Pharisees was due to 
nothing more nor less than their immediate percep- 
tion of its absolute divergence from Pharisaic ideals. 


UDAISM refused then to assimilate the Chris- 
tian ideals, and insisted on preserving its own 
religious integrity. Christian apologists, in their 
effort to relate this fact to a general scheme of the 
religious development of mankind, have adopted a 
very simple explanation and interpretation of the 
action of the Jews. Judaism, they say, was but a 
preparation for Christianity; when Christianity ap- 
peared the purpose for which Judaism had been cre- 
ated had been fulfilled, and Judaism would necessarily 
lose its vitality and worth as a religion and disap- 
pear. This theory was taught quite definitely by 
Paul in the New Testament. ‘The Torah had been 
the schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, and Christ 
had superseded it. Paul, it should be pointed out, 
was enough of a realist to see the formidable diffi- 
culties presented to this theory by the facts. Being 
unable to deny the continued existence of Judaism he 
tried to explain it by declaring (Rom. xi, 25) that 
a blindness of heart had befallen Israel, which would 
last until the fulness of the Gentiles had come in. 
But the Church, repudiating this theory, announced 
that the day of Judaism was definitely over, and its 
inheritance taken from it and given to another; that 
Christ had annulled the Law, and those who still 
clung to it were clinging to a mere phantom. Hence- 


[39] 


forth, the Jews, if they existed at all, were to serve 
only as an example and a warning. 

This theory, conclusive and satisfactory as it is 
from the Christian point of view, is shown clearly 
to be wrong by the undeniable fact that Judaism, 
and more particularly Pharisaism, did not die out 
then or since. The rise of Christianity did not in- 
jure the vitality of Judaism, impair its truth, or 
weaken its validity in the eyes of its adherents. They 
stood fast by their religion in the evil days of the 
two great wars and the terror that followed the last; 
and when the persecution was over, in 138 C. E., 
the Rabbis took up their old task of guiding and 
maintaining the religious life of the people with una- 
bated confidence in that task and trust in God who 
had appointed it for them, even though he had so 
sorely chastened them. From that time down to the 
present day the Jews have remained a people of un- 
dying hope and unconquerable faith, in spite of all 
that Christians could do to convert them, to crush 
them, or ignore them. Neither Christ nor Paul nor 
anybody else has canceled or destroyed Judaism; 
whatever Christians may say, Judaism is still a vital, 
real, and intensely held religion. 


HE usual view of the relation of Judaism to 
Christianity, in which Judaism is said to be a 
preparation for Christianity, is thus seen to be un- 
tenable. It has as its necessary premise the partisan, 
and therefore worthless, judgment of Judaism as an 


[40] 


inferior religion, and as its proof the absolutely un- 
founded assumption that Judaism has disappeared. 
A wider view is possible, we believe, which shall 
include Judaism both before and after Christ, a 
view of which shall show both Judaism and Chris- 
tianity parts in one great whole, one vast design, 
_ each having there a necessary place and function, 
neither being the rival of the other or superseding 
it, but both preparing in their different ways for a 
universal religion of humanity expressing the ulti- 
mate triumph of the divine will. 

This view will depend on a statement of the signi- 
ficance of Christianity somewhat different from the 
usual one. A rapid historical survey of the devel- 
opment of Christian dogma will hint at its distinc- 
tive function in the creation of the religious world 
as we have it today. The tendency of Christianity, 
it was pointed out above, was to diverge away from 
Pharisaism and towards Greek, Roman, and other 
pagan doctrines; this fact has a very important sig- 
nificance for our thesis. From these alien peoples 
Christianity received its chief sacerdotal and sacra- 
mental ideas. As time went on, with the increasing 
proportion of Greeks and Romans among the lead- 
ing Christian teachers, there was a like increase in 
the part which Greek and Roman concepts played 
in Christian dogma and practice. Much of the 
common ceremonies and observances of Christians 
in the early ages were nothing more than rites and 
practices of the pagans taken over bodily and, so to 


[41] 


speak, sprinkled with holy water. The classic ex- 
ample of this process is the transition by which 
the Pope gradually stepped into the place of the 
Roman Emperor. The triumph of Christianity over 
paganism is a proof of the success of this policy 
cf compromise and assimilation. Nor will anyone 
deny that Christianity, through this conversion by 
its missionaries of the pagan world, raised im- 
measurably the general level of the spiritual life of 
humanity. But this intimate contact with the pagan 
world involved a very dangerous risk to the Gospel 
itself and the purity of its teachings. This danger 
consisted in the possible corruption of Christianity 
by a religion and morality of a lower order than 
itself. And we believe that Christianity in gaining 
the world might easily have lost its own soul were 
it not for certain restraining and regulating influ- 
ences that it bore incorporated in itself, namely, the 
conceptions that it still retained from its Jewish 
origin. Had the Church cut herself loose from 
Pharisaic Judaism as completely as she wished to 
do and thought she had done, it is conceivable that 
Christianity would have completely amalgamated — 
with the religions of the Gentile world. It was its 
Jewish inheritance alone that saved it from this peril 
of complete immersion in Gentile practices and a con- 
sequent much lower rank in the scale of religions. 


HE foundations have now been laid for a final 
indication of the relative place of Pharisaic 


[42] 


Judaism and Christianity in world religion. These 
two religious systems, one recalls, represented dis- 
tinct and contrasted viewpoints on life, neither of 
which could by any possibility be transmuted into 
the other, or rightly regarded as the development 
or the completion of the other. Each had its own 
right of existence as each had its own truth to pro- 
claim. Let us consider the contributions that each 
made to the greatest religious achievement of all 
times, the uplifting and purifying of the various 
peoples who were to compose the modern world. The 
specific function of Christianity was, since the pecu- 
liar adaptive power of its teachings better fitted it 
for that work, to begin that great task. Judaism’s 
function it was to remain as a co-present and cor- 
relative religion, because it contained elements of 
permanent religious value not present in or com- 
patible with Christianity. Thus, whatever part 
Christianity was intended to play in the providential 
design for mankind, that part could only be played 
if there were present also, and at every stage, a 
living Judaism. Christian efforts to convert the 
Jews or to destroy Judaism were in reality attempts 
at suicide. She was threatening her own life, since 
she was trying to suppress a form of religion other 
than her own and equally necessary with her own if 
her special task was to be fulfilled. The Church has 
always regarded a living Judaism as a continual 
danger. But a dead Judaism would have been to 
her a fatal disaster. 
[43] 


Still speaking in terms of the divine plan one 
might say that Judaism and Christianity were both 
necessary for the work of raising and purifying the 
religious and moral condition of humanity—Chris- 
tianity as an immediate agent in the work, and Juda- 
ism for its later stages, and to safeguard Christianity 
meanwhile against the danger of its task. Judaism 
waited and still waits, not because of any “hardening 
in part” (in the mischievous phrase of Paul), but 
because the best she has to give, the treasure-trove 
stored up against the future by the Pharisees, will 
only then find acceptance when the preparatory work 
of Christianity has been done, and the world is 
ready for the religion which will unite the imperish- 
able elements of both. 

That Judaism still exists for the performance of 
its allotted task is the contribution of the Pharisees 
to world religion. The Pharisees developed Juda- 
ism, and their successors, the Rabbis, worked in ex- 
actly their spirit to preserve it a living religion in 
the face of a persecuting Church and a scornful and 
hostile world. They saw they had nothing to gain 
religiously from Christianity, and the centuries, 
demonstrating the Church’s anxiety to be “all things 
to all men,” only served to confirm them in their iso- 
lation. In the Halachah they had both a bond to 
keep the Jewish community together and a cloak to 
shield the spirit of Judaism. The Halachah was 
a veritable “armor of God” whereby it should be 
“able to withstand in the evil day and having done 


[44] 


all to stand.” The Pharisees, with their instrument 
the Halachah, did not in any degree bring about the 
degradation of Judaism, its reduction to barren 
formalism, the descent from prophetic freedom to 
organized hypocrisy, so that Christianity might arise 
as the living from the dead, leaving Judaism a 
shrivelled corpse. What they did achieve was the 
preservation of Judaism in all its nobility and purity 
through the ages to fulfil even at the terrible cost 
of sorrow and suffering the task which God had given 
it to do. 

What form that task will assume in ages yet to 
come it is vain to speculate. But when the time 
shall come when Christianity has done all it can do 
under the forms and conditions it has _ hitherto 
adopted, there will be a Judaism able and ready to 
offer its imperishable treasure, kept safe through 
the ages, to a world which will no longer scorn it. 
And at last the two great religions which will each 
have accomplished that for the sake of which God 
made them two and not one, will join in His service 
and inspire the lives of His children. To have be- 
gun the preparation for that far-off divine event 
is the true significance of Pharisaism. 


4 


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